Immigration: More Nickels than Dimes
Mother Jones, CA COMMENTARY:Â Three reasons why the positive impact goes beyond crude costs and benefits.
By Bernard Wasow March 29, 2006
Article created by The Century Foundation.
Economists treat immigration like any other phenomenon that generates costs and benefits. They ask the economist’s one-size-fits-all question: What are the additional benefits and costs to Americans of admitting a few additional immigrants? This kind of marginal-change analysis applied to all immigration is flawed for three reasons.
By looking at the benefits and costs only to today’s Americans, this analysis biases the discussion against immigration. “Will the last one in please shut the door” is the message likely to emerge. Since virtually all Americans are descendents of immigrants, it is not reasonable to exclude the welfare of today’s immigrants—tomorrow’s new citizens—from the analysis. Any discussion that requires a substantial net benefit for today’s citizens sets the bar too high. Since it is obvious that potential immigrants are willing to leave family and friends, risking discrimination, detention, and even death, to come to the United States, the net benefits to them must be very high. Impoverished relatives left behind benefit too, from the remittances immigrants send home. Such remittances now exceed a billion dollars a month to Mexico alone.
The benefits of immigration to today’s Americans are more than the sum of changes in household income from changing the supply of labor and skills. The creativity and dynamism of our economy that is so widely admired all over the world would not exist without immigration. [more]